We're in the heart of the holiday shopping season and e-commerce companies still have the opportunity to make tweaks or upgrades to their websites that will help drive sales. Holiday shopping is expected to rise nearly 17 percent this season, and online retailers large and small want a competitive edge to capture as much revenue as possible.
One place where companies can find this edge is web performance. It's no secret that site speed matters to shoppers. Slower site load times lead to more bounces, fewer conversions and lower user satisfaction. Not so long ago, the bounce rate tipping point was eight seconds. Today, if shoppers have to wait much longer than two seconds to four seconds for a page to load, they start dropping (off) like flies.
This is why online retailers have their website developers and designers work overtime throughout the holiday shopping season to make sure that visitors coming to their sites have a great user experience. Whether you're a marketer in charge of ensuring that consumers have a great holiday shopping experience or a website designer tasked with putting the final touches on a holiday e-commerce site, here are three tips to keep in mind for boosting site speed:
1. Images: The size of the average web page has ballooned since 2003, growing from 94KB to 679KB. Since images are generally the largest assets of a website, they present the greatest opportunity for optimization.
We all know that e-commerce sites need great looking pictures — and lots of them. But crystal-clear images don't have to come with big file sizes. There are many ways to compress images without reducing quality, and numerous tools for doing so (e.g., Yahoo's Smush.it).
There are more technical image weight management techniques worth looking into, such as using sprites to combine images as well as inlining small images as data URIs. A quick Google search will get you started with this.
2. CSS: Many e-commerce sites today are driven by CSS, which can contribute to heavy and slow web pages. A good place to start with CSS is combining several CSS files into one. This can literally mean copying the text of a file, pasting it onto the end of another file of the same type and renaming the script so that you remember where the file resides. This achieves two goals: one, it simplifies the CSS code and two, it turns three separate loads into one single load.
For example, a series of CSS files could go from looking like this:
to this:
.Now the three original CSS files are served by one request, boosting performance. It doesn't hurt that code is easier to read too.
Once you've combined your CSS, compress your CSS by removing white space and condensing text, specifically eliminating comments and changing variable names. Compressor.com is a great tool for CSS compression, and there are a lot of other free tools that work just as well.
3. Third-party widgets: Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter widgets are considered staples for most e-commerce sites, but third-party widgets are the bane of every performance-conscious site operator's life. While there are some widgets that are absolutely crucial for e-commerce sites, having too many third-party widgets can slow a site to a standstill.
The key here is to minimize the number of third-party widgets used on any critical e-commerce pages. Also, it's important to set up any widgets you do use to load asynchronously — i.e., their loading doesn't delay other operations on the web page.
One last thing: Have a baseline. If you decide to make any changes to your widgets, be sure to monitor your web performance before and after the change. Make sure that the monitoring tool you choose can give you real user data (and ideally present the actual browser-specific user experience) for all of your e-commerce pages. The monitoring tool should also be capable of correlating the page rendering process with specific numerical measurements so you're able to quantify the potential impact of any site changes.
Keep Up on Web Performance Reading
Here I've written about the low-hanging fruit of web performance optimization. If you have the time and resources for additional holiday website tweaks, there are a number of other optimizations that are worthwhile, and plenty of free how-to resources. A few sites that have some great web performance tips include Planet Performance, SitePoint and Smashing Magazine.
Best of luck to all the e-commerce design and development teams out there, and I encourage you to leave your comments about the best ways you've found to boost site speed.
Bob Buffone is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Yottaa, a provider of cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services.
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